Documents and other printed materials may be incorporated into workflows for monitoring, tracking, data gathering etc. A workflow may include a sequence of connected steps and may provide a depiction for a sequence of operations, which may be declared as the “work” or task(s) of a person, a group of persons, an organization, and/or some other functional mechanism.
A workflow may be seen as an abstraction of real work. From the point of view of task management, a workflow may provide a view or glimpse of real work that is occurring or may occur. A workflow may serve also as a virtual representation of actual work. The flow or movement being described in a workflow may refer to a document or printed material (such as a label attached to a product) that is being transferred from one step to another.
Workflow use may be increasing, in part because of factors such as increased use of mobile imaging to connect physical items (like labels and other documents) to electronic (computerized) back-end processes. Additionally, as more tasks incorporate computerized monitoring or tracking features (or become in general more digital/electronic), and as features such as cloud services (Web-based computing resources) become more available to enable collaborative workflows (which may have been previously impractical), the rate of workflow use may further increase. Such an Increase may cause a continually larger percentage of printed material to be intentionally linked in workflows to provide electronic content (e.g. tracking or monitoring data) that may be “on-line” and available in real time.
Labels, packaging, documents, tickets and many other printed items may serve as tokens in electronic workflows. Labels, for example, increasingly “carry” (or are linked to) point-of-sale, consumer/brand interaction, “track and trace” (e.g. logistics for determining current and past locations of property), “ePedigree” (e.g. electronic chain-of-custody), authentication, and/or forensic information that can be examined or “interrogated” by a manufacturer, distributor, retailer, consumer, and/or investigative agent, as part of their interaction with the physical world.
Where considered appropriate, reference numerals may be repeated among the drawings to indicate corresponding or analogous elements. Moreover, some of the blocks depicted in the drawings may be combined into a single function.